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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Given the revelation that it hooks into Spotify to get playlists etc, I really wish there wasn’t that strong of a dependency on Spotify, and that I could just search for songs and start playing.

    I was hoping for more YouTube music player, and less Spotify.

    I have Spotify Premium which I pay for, and the desktop client is very fast and snappy to play songs. SpotTube is OK, but it isn’t as snappy as Spotify. For something that is free, that is absolutely fine, but the fact it requires Spotify for playlist etc…

    I definitely get why. Spotify does playlist generation like no other, and it is the biggest platform by far. But I kind of wish I had a version that wasn’t all about the algorithms.

    Also, the way you “login” to Spotify on the desktop is incredibly user un-friendly at best, and incredibly brittle at worst. Copying and pasting a cookie that Spotify uses shouldn’t be used as a way to login to any service, like, at all. And if Spotify are smart, they’ll break this functionality within a month or so using something like Fingerprint.js to identify which device the session belongs to, thus invalidating the session.





  • So a few weeks back it’s been officially confirmed I’m being made redundant.

    I had a job interview last Friday - late stage. I’m hoping they come back with some positive news. The interview went okay. I think I did well with the Java stuff, but when I was asked about Javascript Event Loops, I was completely befuzzled.

    Back at work, and we all have to act like we give a shit. Not too great, I wish I was done with the company overall.

    Luckily I have another job interview next week - something to look forward too!

    Overall, a pretty resounding “meh”.









  • It’s funny. When I saw this last night, I was in such disbelief that I was watching the real trailer that I was nitpicking all the way going “Nah, this looks bad, R* wouldn’t do that. That looks too good for a GTA game” etc until I double-and-triple-checked the links and went “oh”.

    Now I’ve had a few hours to digest:

    • The buildings and environments look absolutely beautiful
    • It seems to be running at 60FPS? Thank goodness
    • The characters look… waxy… I will say that black characters look absolutely phenomenal - much better than previous entries
    • This whole game sort of feels like “GTA V+”, which makes sense. Unfortunately, I’ve overhyped myself to a level that R* could never achieve. Not really R*'s problem, but still a bummer.
    • Looking at some of the social media/news freeze frames, it seems a lot of the satire’s edginess has been toned down a lot. Honestly? Thank goodness. GTA V was nauseating in how much it was trying to be a shock-jockey. However, I hope R* will still have its political leaning. Even if I don’t agree with R*, it (usually) is something of substance and is usually somewhat grown up (with exception of GTA V)
    • I would bet money that GTA VI will be delayed to 2026.
    • It will be interesting to see how the writing will be now that Dan Houser has left. It seems OK so far.
    • Everyone’s faces look so expressive except for the two main characters. They just look kind of robotic

    EDIT: One massive thing I forgot - the marketing for this was so stupid. R* kept saying “Upcoming Grand Theft Auto title” as if it wasn’t going to be called “Grand Theft Auto VI” like they called GTA5 “Grand Theft Auto V” and the one before with roman numerals. Like, for goodness sakes guys, get over yourselves. We know it’s going to be called Grand Theft Auto VI.




  • I don’t think folks realise how much effort and investment Valve has put into making Linux a viable gaming alternative for modern-ish games.

    Most distributors use Windows because it is easy to install and setup for gaming. Is it perfect? No. But any vendor can pay Microsoft and get a viable OS for gaming.

    Linux will need a lot of custom graphics card drivers and a lot of tweaking (think power as well as graphical features, memory, CPU etc) to get the optimum performance. Most OSes out of the box have OKish performance for gaming, which is OK for any hobbyist but would be a disaster for a consumer product.

    And before Valve came along, Proton wasn’t even a thing. Proton is now a thing, and the way Steam utilises it makes it effortless, but it will need a fair bit of custom args to get it working well.

    Each of these things separately can be quite painful in its own right, but altogether it would be a headache for any company not well versed in Linux. Not only that, but having to provide customer support for a Linux OS would put the fear in most companies.

    I would imagine most vendors would just slap Windows on their machine and be like “you know what to do with this” and let them go nuts.